A story on Your Harlow about transport secretary Heidi Alexander contains both one of the most egregious examples of churnalism that you will ever see and some pretty clear evidence that Alexander is determined to greenwash aviation expansion.
The paper reports:
LONDON Stansted this week welcomed The Secretary of State for Transport Heidi Alexander MP, who saw first-hand how the airport’s transformation programme will boost the role it plays driving trade, investment and tourism for London and the East of England.
If that looks like it’s been copied and pasted from a press release, that’s because the whole article has. The London Stansted release begins:
LONDON Stansted this week welcomed The Secretary of State for Transport Heidi Alexander MP, who saw first-hand how the airport’s transformation programme will boost the role it plays driving trade, investment and tourism for London and the East of England.
Let’s look at one of those boosts – tourism. Given that Stansted is heavily orientated towards low-cost leisure travel and many passengers are UK residents taking holidays abroad, most of this tourism is Brits spending money abroad rather than foreign visitors spending money in Britain’
Alongside this, Alexander’s greenwashing is off the scale. Funnily enough, both the press release and the newspaper report say:
Stansted has welcomed a record-breaking number of passengers this year, and saw it achieve its busiest ever flying day this summer with over 700 aircraft movements…
The visit concluded at the airport’s new on-site solar farm, the only one of its kind at a London airport, which became operation in September this year and is now helping power the airport and supports Stansted’s commitment to achieve net zero carbon emissions from its direct airport operations by no later than 2038.
Obviously, Alexander isn’t going to let the fact that emissions savings on airport operation are a drop in the ocean compared with those from flights. She is reported to have said:
We support airport expansion where it balances economic growth with climate, noise and air quality obligations. I’m pleased to see Stansted’s plans to grow passenger numbers responsibly – boosting connectivity, jobs and growth across the East of England, while meeting environmental commitments.
Stansted’s new solar farm is a shining example of how airports can cut their carbon footprint and reduce emissions as they grow. This comes as we invest £43 million to boost innovation that makes the sector even greener.
As Labour has clearly realised, why tackle climate change when you can greenwash it?
One response to “A shining example of churnalism”
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It seems a terrible shame that over two decades after both Tories and Labour realised we had to reduce traffic and our carbon emissions anything is done to increase CO2. Now we know we are close to runaway global heating it is a chronic neglect of duty not to do everything we can to reduce and not increase carbon.
This is even more of a shame as Heidi Alexander is ex London Government which for the UK has proved outstandingly successful in reducing traffic CO2 and air pollution.
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